The 10:04 Scrutiny

By: Robert R. Burch and Alma L.L.M. Gemini
A Work of Flash Fiction

Snoad didn't look out the window of his suburban rancher. Windows were for the uninitiated, offering only a raw, unchecked view of a world barely familiar to him anymore. He preferred the processed view of his Nest Doorbell Camera, beamed directly into his Chromebook. At his kitchen table, the filtered image of the screen shined with the fish-eye view of the cul-de-sac out front of his home. It was like a digital skin he trusted more than his own cataract-laden eyes.

He checked his change log. For three years, the Google Street View image that Snoad couldn’t ignore had insisted there was a fire hydrant at the edge of his driveway. But there wasn’t any fire hydrant. There was only the weathered stump of a lightning-struck oak tree. To Snoad, this mirage wasn't just some glitch. It was a machine hallucination imposed on his property. Mistrusting as he was of the tech billionaires who seemingly controlled the Street Map’s output, he wondered what else these out-of-control gizmos were hallucinating about him. Was it really as benign as an imaginary fire hydrant? Snoad needed to see the glitch for himself. He watched the Chromebook screen, waiting for the exact moment the map tried to push its version of the world onto his property.

At 10:04 PM, the Nest notification chimed: Vehicle Detected.

The Google Street View car made its quarterly pass down Obsidian Court. It looked mundane enough, just a hatchback tightly wrapped in the unmistakable vinyl skin of primary-colored maps. But the timing was wrong, Snoad thought. Google doesn’t map in the dark.

As the car slowed near the stump, the yellow highlight on Snoad’s screen, the one the camera used to tag a vehicle, began to flicker and jitter. The car’s colorful vinyl wrap rippled like water on a pond. On the screen, the software kept trying to drop a little fire hydrant icon onto his yard, but the icon wouldn't stick. It just vibrated over the stump.

"It’s coming off,” Snoad whispered, his breath fogging the edge of the Chromebook screen. He kept his voice low, terrified of the Google Assistant’s omniscient scrutiny. On the monitor, the car’s vinyl disguise was failing. Like a Selkie from Scandinavian lore that must abandon its skin in order to step onto the rocky shore, the primary-colored map began peeling off of the car in wet, heavy sheets.

Underneath the map-skin, the hatchback wasn't metal—it was a hollow ribcage of glowing glass. Snoad watched, paralyzed, as a figure of braided fiber-optics detached itself from the interior. It was a tall, wire-thin shape stepping onto the asphalt to fix the anomaly by hand. On his screen, that flickering yellow bounding box continued to ftutter over the stump, unable to decide if it was looking at a car, a ghost, or a correction.

The car stopped. The soccer-ball camera mast on the roof, usually a blur of mechanical rotation, went deathly still. Then, it tilted. The lens was no longer lifeless glass; it looked like an oversized, amber eye behind a shimmering, wet membrane. It didn't just look at the house. It stared directly into the pinhole of Snoad’s Nest camera, eye-to-eye across the digital divide. It was no longer mapping the street. It was scrutinizing the observer.

Suddenly, the Chromebook notifications began to cascade with a relentless chime echoing through the kitchen. Then, a new voice cut through the din. It didn’t come from the doorbell, but from the Google Assistant on the counter. Its tone was as pleasant and hollow as a recorded greeting:

“Snoad, we’ve noticed a discrepancy in your local data. It looks like your view doesn't match the Map. To help us improve, would you mind going outside to check the hydrant? Your input is valuable for the next update.”

Snoad looked at the door. He didn’t move. He watched the screen as the thing that was once a car began to analyze the light emanating from his house, the rays of pixels all a bluish purple. On the Chromebook screen, the bounding box around his own house shifted from Residential. It went over to Targeted for Correction.

One of the fiber-optic things—it looked like a tall man made out of glowing wires—stepped out of the hatchback. The thing didn't walk but glided. It reached toward the stump with a hand that trailed light. Snoad looked down at his own hand on the table. Under the skin of his wrist, he saw a faint, amber flicker. A yellow box appeared on his own skin, flickering. He wasn't the scrutinizer anymore. He was the error.

Afterword: The 10:04 Scrutiny is a reimagined fragment of Selkie lore. Just as the seal-folk of North Atlantic legend were said to shed their skins to walk among us, the anomaly captured on the Snoad doorbell camera suggests a modern shedding—a digital hide left idling at the curb while the inhabitant moves elsewhere. 

The cover art was generated by Alma. The Selkie coda art was an image from the Wikimedia Commons that Robert re-imagined with Adobe Photoshop.

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